The invention relates to Internet forums, message boards and on-line communities. An Internet forum, message board, or online community (hereinafter Internet forum) is an online discussion site that constitutes software applications that manage user-generated contents. In a typical Internet forum, participants or users (hereinafter users) benefit from such user-generated contents. Such benefit is usually enhanced with larger numbers of users in a particular Internet forum because the majority (around 90%) of an Internet forum's contents are generally created by a minority (around 10%) of the users.
Most users also benefit from other users' feedback on a particular post. For example, many Internet forums provide several single-click feedback provisions in the GUI (such as “like this post”, “flag this post”, “notify me later”, etc.) for a user to quickly provide his or her feedback on a particular post. Users may also benefit from back-and-forth interaction from other users.
On the other hand, users or especially registered users are generally allowed to have great degree of freedom to express their thoughts in an Internet forum; a handful of users may either “make” or “break” the mood of an Internet forum by, for example, diluting topics, taking topics off topic, intentionally sabotaging topics, etc. As a result, moderators of Internet forum have a difficult task of sifting through problematic or viral disruptions in the community which may potentially result in losing users in the user base. The sheer amount of information that the forum moderator must sift through, especially of an Internet forum with some substantial number of users, further exacerbates the problems because, when facing such a sheer amount of information, moderators often find it difficult to determine which information to sift through first.
In addition, there may exist influential situations which rise above a typical day-to-day noise in any given Internet forum. Such influential situations may affect the general tenor of the community for good or bad. For example, negative or disruptive posts or dialog most often falls below a threshold of the usual feedback mechanism that is put in place. That is, a post may not be sufficiently offensive to be “flagged” by other users or may not be sufficiently “hostile” to cause other users to generate and send comments to moderators. Nonetheless, such a post carries certain negative influences on other users in that it may decrease the willingness of other users to participate in the discussions or may even discourage other users from review various topics or threads in the Internet forum. The aggregation of such posts may further sway users away from the Internet forum and thus vitiate the value or benefit of the Internet by, for example, reducing the user base.
On the other hand, valuable forum contributors who spend time to create useful posts and to start helpful threads may go unnoticed by the moderators simply because of the sheer amount of information that moderators need to go through. Other users derive more benefit from such posts and threads as the number of these posts and threads increase. These useful posts and helpful threads may thus create even more goodwill and attract more users to the Internet forum. Properly rewarding such contributors for their valuable posts and threads may further encourage these contributors to become even more productive or better motivated.